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Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

John Timmer of Ars Technica reviews The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (Princeton University Press, March 2017) by founding IAS Director Abraham Flexner with a companion essay by current IAS Director Robbert Dijkgraaf . Of the book, Timmer writes, "In it are...

"Flexner makes two points that seem to me particularly important right now, especially for policy makers thinking about higher education in the United States. One is that it is impossible to predict what research will turn out to be "useful" and therefore it’s foolish to...

“In some sense, the evidence of the usefulness of science is all around us,” Robbert Dijkgraaf said. “It’s in our back pockets, in our blood streams. We are governed by science—everybody is, even the people who aren’t supportive of it. But we are simply not...

On the face of it, usefulness seems more definable in the fields of science, where it can be expressed in theses, discoveries, inventions and products. But even here usefulness can be elusive. In his article “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (contained in the...

"Almost every discovery has a long and precarious history. Someone finds a bit here, another a bit there. A third step succeeds later and thus onward till a genius pieces the bits together and makes the decisive contribution."—from the essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.”...

Video of Curious Paradox: The Usefulness of Knowledge at the New York Public Library now available here . Curious Paradox: The Usefulness of Knowledge at the New York Public Library Participants: Robbert Dijkgraaf, Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor and...

By radically reducing the amount of scientific research U.S. scientists can do, the president’s budget willfully ignores 400 years of thinking about innovation and knowledge—and seven decades of the United States’ advantage in the world. “It’s like we’ve forgotten we went through a scientific revolution,”...